


Close to the sun in lonely lands

by orphan_account



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Blushing, F/M, Gen, Guards, Gun-slinging, Maids, Meet-Cute, Swordplay, Unexpected Hugs, Victorian, nice things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-11
Updated: 2017-06-11
Packaged: 2018-11-12 18:32:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11167629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: She remembered stepping on a few of her own shells, halved, as he’d helped her to her feet. The leather of his gloves soft enough to feel like skin against her hands.





	Close to the sun in lonely lands

He excused them from the room, albeit rudely, but they were here to show face, nothing more. He ignored the young Earl’s affronted face. If the other Charles did his job properly, he wouldn’t be expressing much at all, and soon. Their boots sunk, muted by the rich carpeting covering the floor.

  
    “Ah, I wish it was you that had been stuck with this one.”

  
    “I could still come along.” Phipps offered, safe in the knowledge that Chuck would turn him down. As expected, the pale patrician nose of his colleague wrinkled.

  
    “No way. Too boring.”

  
    “Too sensible.” He said, mouth curving into a rarely seen smile, but Chuck just scowled at him, and laced his hands behind his head.

  
    “As you say. I just want this one over with. It’s complicated. Too many variables. It’s as if the Queen wanted him to- Hey!”

  
    Phipps executed a turn on his heel, regarding Charles Grey quizzically.

  
    “Where are you going?”

  
    “Through the kitchen.” Phipps replied, and Chuck looked at him for a long moment, before shrugging.

  
    “Whatever.” Phipps righted himself on his course, continuing down the tastefully decorated hallway. “Those were good cream puffs, I suppose.”

  
:

  
    “Hello again.”

  
    Mey-rin shrieked, the knife and carrots she held flying from her hands. He plucked them easily out of the air, the swiftness of his black gloves eerily reminiscent of Sebastian-san. He proffered the knife to her, handle first and Mey-rin accepted it with shaking hands.

  
    “Hello.” She said, and her voice quavered as she finally steeled herself to look up to him. His face was as expressionless as it had been earlier, as clear as it was earlier, glasses safely in her pocket so she didn’t crack the new pair. She remembered stepping on a few of her own shells, halved, as he’d helped her to her feet. The leather of his gloves soft enough to feel like skin against her hands.

  
    “We’d like to apologize for earlier.” He told her, and she was gripping the knife too hard, the blade turned flat, so she could see her own wide eyes. Mey-rin made herself place it neatly on the wooden cutting board in front of her. She could feel Bard’s avid interest from beside the stove, could hear Tanaka still slurping his tea from his usual chair beside the kitchen door. She worked a respectable job now, in the young Master’s service, and that meant acting the part of a lady.

  
    Unless provoked, of course.

  
    She sketched a hasty curtsey, her cheeks flushed with the knowledge that she’d stood frozen too long.

  
    “Ah, no worries-ah, um. Sir, ah-Charles-um-san-”

  
    “You can call me Phipps.” He said, and Mey-rin sputtered nervously, flustered. Oh, she had been too informal-! “All of my friends choose to do so.”

  
    “Oh, of course.” She murmured subdued by her own foolishness, and his mouth listed upward, hinting at a smile. Only a hint, but it melted the sharp shelf of his cheekbones, softened his eyes, and _oh, no she was staring again_.

  
    “HEY!”

  
    “What?!”

  
    “You got any more of those cream puffs, chef?”

  
    “Not for the likes of you!” Bard said indignantly.

  
    “I’ll come wait on you again.” Phipps told her, meeting her eyes quite seriously. Then they were gone, Phipps leading his shouting friend away by the elbow. Bard griped about it for the rest of the day.

  
:

  
    “Hello again.”

  
    Her voice was quiet, and Phipps turned to his left and _down_ , her head abreast of his shoulder, as she stood beside him. She was pale hanging smoke,  none of the fire he’d dreamed about warming himself over. It was understandable. The circumstances under which they met were hardly merry. Chuck had made a complete mess of things, worse than he ever had, with no seeming explanation other than _bad luck_. The Phantomhive curse. Luckily, the Queen had been most understanding with her favorite brat of a guard, treating the other Charles quite leniently. Standing here, trying not to shuffle his feet like a boy, he didn’t know why.

  
    “I’m sorry.” He told her, the most sincere thing he could manage given his own place in the sordid tragedy before him. She let out a queer, sniffling wail, before latching onto him, her face pressed flat to the stiff fabric of his coat jacket. If it had been an attack, he’d have been dead. Instead, he had an armful of sweet, weeping woman and it made him tighten his hold, unthinkingly.

  
    “You remind me of him.” She told him later, her ringed hawk eyes bared like an uncased jewel. They were red from grief, from her rubbing out her tears uselessly. “I just wanted to feel- _to feel_.”

  
    Maybe he should be thanking Chuck, he thought.

  
:

  
    “He’s alive!” Mey-rin explained in an explosive whisper when he dropped by the Phantomhive estate a week later. Her gentle, deadly hands gestured unchecked to the gaunt specter of a man filleting a fish with uncomfortable grace. “And to think Master Ciel almost didn’t get a casket with a bell-”

  
    “You see, Bardroy?” Cool, arch tones and the absolute adoration in his maid’s gaze was disquieting him more than he’d like to admit. “And then you may add it to the egg and cream.”

  
    “All at once?”

  
    “No, more slo- Well. That’s fine, Baldroy...”

  
    “I’m glad you’re happy.” He told her and she graced his efforts with a smile, bright and sunny under the clear crystal of her spectacles. “I’m just glad that Bocchan-”

  
    “Everything all right, Mey-rin?” Phipps watched her stiffen, her cheeks warming red under the heat of the other man’s strange coppery eyes. Discomfort in his uncertainty pressed Phipps tightly upright, his posture held stiffly under control.

  
    “Ah-ah-ah-Sebastian-san! Th-this is-”

  
    “One of Her Majesty’s servants.” The butler intoned, cutting off her words as neatly as he had trimmed the unwanted skin off his fish. The obvious distaste in his voice made Phipps raise an eyebrow.

  
    “Better than a servant to a cur.” He said diffidently, but the other man just smiled, a queer thing, with tight, crisp edges that dragged peculiarly high up his cheeks. _Disquieting._

  
    “You would think.” Was all he had to say however. “Did you have some business here, sir?”

  
    “I came to speak with Miss Mey-rin.” He stated boldly, and at Mey-rin’s appropriately dramatic gasp beside him, he watched a flicker of humor drift across Sebastian’s face.

  
    “Mey-rin, I will finish this.” He said, turning as though to dismiss Phipps from him entirely. He slid the dough from her frozen hands without immediate distress. “Why don’t you show our rude guest the gardens?”

  
    “But-Se-se-sebastian-”

  
    “Go, Mey-rin.” He told her firmly, a dark assertion coloring his words, and at that tone she quit her attempts to protest entirely, merely ceding her previous station over to his capable hands.  As she pulled her apron free of her gown, he turned, dough still in one bare hand, and sketched a shallow mocking bow. “Mr. Phipps.”

  
    His nails were black, a deeper color than lacquer could give, and matte.

  
    “Michaelis.” He replied with a clipped nod of his head, and then followed out the door his maid had left through. She wasn’t leading him out to the fenced kitchen garden, herb and vegetable plots sitting warm in the rare sun, as he’d assumed. Instead she led him further, deeper onto the property. White roses bloomed profusely, huge, wet blossoms on trellis that rose taller than him twice over. They filled the air with their rich, dusky scent, and he could see the pink of her hand trailing through the blooms just ahead of him.

  
    Always just ahead of him, her slim form and black belled skirts continuously out of reach, like a dream.

  
    He rounded the corner, and there she was. Facing him head on, her tigers’ eye gaze fixed on his face, a pistol in each outstretched hand. His feet came to a natural stop and the breeze blew a sweet torrent of white petals between their stand off.

  
    “Miss-”

  
    “Why are you here?” She asked, and her voice was clear like a whip snap lashing him. Her eyes gleamed, darting over his body and Phipps stood as still as he could under her inspection.

  
    “I wanted to speak to you.” He told her plainly, and it was harder to say the words than he’d thought it would be. He’d never truly done this before.

  
    “Why?” She asked, and he could hear the genuine confusion in her voice. Every beat of his heart devoured by her watching eyes. “To insult my Bocchan?”

  
    “Your eyes.” Phipps said abruptly and that must be too honest of him, because those same tawny eyes widened, dark lashes fanning across pale skin. Facing down beautiful, sharp-shooting maids in a noble’s rose garden. The job he’d dreamed of as a young boy, aspiring to Queen’s guard. “I wanted to _see_ you.”

  
    He swallowed.

  
    “I wanted you to see me.”

  
    Her stare pierced through him, to the weft and weave of his soul and slowly, her arms lowered.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Ladies don't start fights, they [finish them](http://honeyedlion.tumblr.com/).


End file.
